I was always fascinated as a child with the blood pressure apparatus in the doctor's office. It looked like some kind of torture device to me. I watched the doctor check my dad's blood pressure, and I was sure it was going to hurt him! I'd squeeze my eyes shut and whisper, "Please don't hurt my daddy... please don't hurt my daddy." The doctor was a kind man, and he would let me pump the cuff up as far as I could while my dad assured me that it didn't hurt.
Since then I have learned that:
PRESSURE ULCER
1. Galen, the ancient Greek physician, was the first to suggest that blood existed in the human body. He believed that the heart constantly produced blood.
2. In 1616, William Harvey said that Galen was wrong, and that there was a certain amount of blood in the body. The heart, he asserted, did not produce blood. That assertion wasn't met with a lot of approval because it raised doubts about bloodletting, then a popular medical procedure.
3. A British veterinarian, Reverend Stephen Hales, first measured it in a horse in 1733. He inserted a brass pipe into an artery of the horse and connected it to a glass tube. He observed that as the horse's heart beat, the blood would rise in the tube. This was a procedure that was just too invasive to be used in a clinical setting.
4. The first human blood pressure was recorded in 1847. Catheters were inserted directly into the artery, so the method was still too invasive.
5. Physicians and scientists began looking for a noninvasive method of measuring blood pressure, and in 1855 Karl Vierordt found that using an inflatable cuff around the arm would constrict the artery.
6. Scipione Riva-Rocci developed the mercury sphygmomanometer in 1896, which was the precursor of the blood pressure apparatus that I was so skeptical of in that doctor's office those many years ago.
History of Measuring Blood Pressure PRESSURE ULCER
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